Our Brain, The Ghost

The greatest ghost in this life of mine is the source of my humanity: the brain.

This mass of nerves, this elaborate thing orchestrating all thoughts of mine enables equal parts wonder and frustration.

On one hand, consciousness is a marvel of divine power. It very easily could have been that our species evolved into a brain capable only of primal thoughts. For example, the pursuit of shelter, food, water, and reproduction. The divinity is precisely in how sophisticated the human consciousness is. We seek primal needs, yes, but we also search for existential meaning, grace, and transcendence. In a world that is by all measures characterized by these primal needs, we find ourselves with the search for something higher.

The haunting frustration is from our ability of meta-reflection. More specifically, the greatest trouble is reflection on our perception.

Very soon, I need to move to somewhere new. It appears to me, which all appearences are distorted, that I have two distinct choices: nurturing roots in my current state, or austere financial planning in a cheaper state.

When I think of staying in my current state, my mind cries "You are abandoning financial independence! You will be a slave, and you know that your soul needs freedom. This is the wrong choice!"

When I think of moving to a cheaper state, my mind screams "This is a trauma response of detachment and avoidance! You toil and read too many books, and every page confirms your bias that you are above the material world. You are a blind fool pretending to see, and you will suffer for this choice!"

Even as I write this, my brain says to me "You are but a creature, and all you need are primal things. You are rationalizing an aesthetic of detachment, and you are arrogant for believing you are above such things."

I find most of my actions and thoughts perpetually criticized by this ghost.

I wish that I had some higher synthesis, some conclusion to the dialectic of my brain. But I don't. The easiest resolution would to believe the fallacy that the median of extremes is appropriate, but that is not always true.

Maybe some would argue that the appropriate synthesis, the only true conclusion, would be to hold the contradiction of these extremes in my head.

The greatest problem is this: that ghost is me.

If I fundamentally can't trust my perception and knowledge, but the ghost is part of me, then I can't trust the ghost either.

Who is to say that the ghost is not speaking from the reigns of forgotten trauma, unexamined biases?

I know one thing to be true, without interruption, though.

The foundation of a good life is one that applies a greedy algorithm to each day: make the best choices available to us, abandon regret of painful things, and somehow all shall be well.